[tytso]

> motion sickness is a major barrier

I recall a story from a colleague who knew some folks who had worked on the game System Shock (this was in the early nineties). System shock was one of the first games that had an engine that implemented real 3D physics; so when you threw a grenade, it would describe a real parabola. And you can lean around a corner and sneak a peak without exposing your entire body to enemy fire, and when you did that, the 1st person shooter rendering would realistically reflect that. They had an experimental version of the game that was hooked to a virtual reality headset at the time, and gave up on it because, as one of them joked, it was "virtual reality, real nausea".

This was 30 years ago, and things haven't improved since then.

[VLM]

"Descent" goes back 28 years and I remember getting pretty disoriented and a little nausea, worse than I ever experienced flying a small airplane.

"Descent" was the game where you blast robots in a very 3-d mine.

One oddity of "VR" is it initially attracts people with excellent visuospatial analysis skills; the problem is the majority of the population is not good at it. It would be like implementing a user interface based on bench pressing 275 pounds of real world weights; it would be an incredibly popular fad among people already qualified to participate, then the general public would LOL and that's it. So that's the problem selling VR to the general public; most folks aren't very good at solving maze puzzles and drawing 3D CAD drawings in their heads so a UI based on that will be a hard sell.

[dtagames]

When I started out in web design and development in 1995, a lot of companies were showing early "VR" and 3D interfaces, touting them as the next great thing. Somehow, people got the idea that reaching around in 3D space for everything was better than just picking from a menu, a list, or an index -- like we have done for 1,000 years.

I feel like all the 3D hype is just that. While it could be fun in games in a holodeck-type environment (but probably not outside of that, 'cause physics), I don't think the majority of everyday human interactions with information are better off in 3D. Why would anyone think so? We don't read in 3D. We don't write in 3D. We don't make pictures in 3D. Why would a 3D interface be better?